Building links to your backlinks to stay ahead of competition

Everyone knows that link popularity plays an important role in SEO and the number of high quality links to your website determines your ranking positions in the search engines. For those people not familiar with the term backlink, it is just a link to your site which is placed on another website.

Over the years, I’m sure you have built a lot of backlinks to help promoting your website and you must still be doing that now which is a good thing. However what I want to address today is something that is overlooked by many webmasters and that’s to do with whether your backlinks are indexed or not. The problem is that Google finds thousands of new webpages everyday and older pages which do not have enough links to them are dropped. They can be called orphaned pages and they could be the result of being buried deep down a website, maybe too many levels before you reach that webpage or not enough reference to it. When that happens, the page is then removed from Google’s index.

This might not sound like a problem for you if this isn’t happening on your website but if you have a webpage that is linking to you but is not currently in Google’s index, then you will not get the benefit of that backlink. Put it this way, if you were an extremely good plumber but no one knew about your talent, then you would be missing out on plenty of plumbing jobs, wouldn’t you. Similarly, if Google is not aware that this other website is linking to you, that is, recommending your webpage, then you will not get the link juice and SEO value from it.

That is why it is important to keep track of your backlinks. If you haven’t done it yet, you might want to keep a simple text file of the webpages which have links to your website. This will come handy in the future. Anyway, if you know for sure that a certain website was linking to you before, you can check whether that particular webpage is still indexed in Google. If it isn’t then, you will need to build links to it. The process is called building backlinks to your backlinks and is very important because by having many websites linking to you, this will increase your rankings. On top of that, aged backlinks carry more weight than new backlinks, so they will help you rank for your keywords better.

You can use any link building method to create backlinks to your backlinks but I’d recommend using the easiest way especially if you have lots of backlinks which you want to resurrect. Social bookmarking, forum profiles and blog commenting are rather easy methods of generating link to your backlinks.

So remember to keep an eye for the old backlinks that you may have and keep them indexed to benefit from those links. Otherwise you’ll be creating new links everyday and they’ll be disappearing few months down the line and you’ll see no real progress when you should really be dominating your niche.